Got The Power Boomboxes: Sugarcane and Cotton is a series of public sculptures and activations at historically significant sites, honoring the role pan-African music and art have played in freedom movements around the world. This series consists of sculptural monuments, public events, and international partnerships that examine Hip Hop and other pan-African musical and artistic forms as global liberation movements rooted in resistance to colonialism and the laws and policies that stem from the sugar, cotton and tobacco industries. These site-specific sculptures are constructed out of sugarcane and cotton boombox replicas, tobacco leaves, cotton vines and other valuable materials from the colonial economies of the Americas and Africa. They play mixtapes in public spaces made out of local people’s favorite freedom songs, their oral histories and short excerpts from historians discussing the history of the sugar, tobacco and cotton industries, and their impact on the Americas, Europe and Africa, which includes their economic, legal and political impact in each region. Sugarcane and cotton represent two of the largest cash crops that built the billion-dollar economies that emrged from the colonization of the Americas and Africa by European colonial powers. They set in motion the economies and subsequent migrations that shape the current state of culture and economic wealth in the Americas, Africa, and Europe. Boomboxes represent African-Descendant music, especially Hip Hop, in the entertainment industry. The billion-dollar industries of sugar, cotton, tobacco and contemporary music and entertainment, can be traced back to the labor and ingenuity of Black and Indigenous bodies. However, these communities are not the primary recipients of the intergenerational wealth from these industries.  It is also important to insert accurate history into public spaces at a time when history is often sanitized, and obscured for political purposes. The boombox replicas, created in collaboration with Pulp Works,  are a sustainable packaging material that also epresent imaginative solutions to sustainability and climate change; solutions to some of the challenges that emerged from the extractive economics of colonialism. 

This is an ongoing series of international public artworks. Sculptures have been installed in Harlem, NY, Paris, France, Ouidah, Benin, Montgomery, Alabama, Saint-Denis, France and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Each edition is a unique and site-specific. Each site’s mixtape is broadcast from the sculpture and is streamed online, connecting the music and stories from each location to a larger colonial and economic history, while highlighting solutions that arise when people come together, locally and globally, to resolve the world’s most pressing challenges.